Re: Nqwebasaurus, an African ornithomimosaur

[tyazbeck@comcast.net]

Good point.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Johansson" <andreasj@gmail.com>
To: "DML" <dinosaur@usc.edu>
Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2012 3:40:33 AM
Subject: Re: Nqwebasaurus, an African ornithomimosaur

On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Ilja Nieuwland <lists@sumol.nl> wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Jun 2012 07:32:23 +0200, Tim Williams <tijawi@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thomas Yazbeck  <tyazbeck@comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I mean people who live in multi-story buildings, wear actual clothes (not
>>> loincloths), have electricity, as opposed to primitive men like those
>>> in Africa or South America (jungle hunter-gatherers). English and other
>>> widely-spoken languages use much fewer sounds than many
>>> primitive languages (such as those used by American Indians), which are
>>> sometimes rather complicated.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> This is satire, right?
>
>
> I surely hope so. But if it isn't, a few examples: Estonian (you know,
> Estonia, full of multi-story buildings) has twenty-six diphtongs, Hungarian
> (Hungary, country full of fully clothed people) uses a vocal harmony system
> that will scare the crap out of you, and anyone looking for linguistic
> simplicity in Chinese is up for a hard search indeed.

Chinese syllable structure is fairly simple (simpler than English's, certainly).

While I doubt that the common claim that all languages are equally
complex is true in any measurable sense (how do you compare
syllable-structure complexity to syntactical complexity? Is one vowel
less worth the same amount of complexity as seventy three irregular
verbs extra?), it's true that languages tend to distribute their
complexity in different ways and it's hard to think of one that seems
simple, or complex, in all areas.


-- 
Andreas Johansson

Why can't you be a non-conformist just like everybody else?